L&H's Dictaphone HSG Forms Dedicated R&D Team to Further Develop Natural Language Processing Technologies for the Healthcare Provider Market

Business Wire, Feb 5, 2001

Business Editors and Health/Medical Writers

HIMSS 2001

NEW ORLEANS--(BW HealthWire)--Feb. 5, 2001

Advanced technology will enable valuable medical data to be

readily extracted from patient records

Annual HIMSS Conference & Exhibition

Dictaphone Healthcare Solutions Group (Dictaphone HSG), a division of Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. (EASDAQ: LHSP, OTC: LHSPQ) (`L&H' or `the Company'), a world leader in speech and language technology, products and services today announced the formation of a dedicated R&D team to accelerate the development of proprietary Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology obtained through last year's acquisition of Computer Based Medicine, Inc. (CBM) of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

NLP technology recognizes and structures data contained in electronic, text-based patient reports, making invaluable medical information readily accessible. NLP technology also enables healthcare providers to feed this clinical data into a variety of information systems, including computer-based patient record systems, decision support systems, and data collection and reporting systems.

Current CBM software is able to analyze electronic text documents from a linguistic perspective as well as address context and ambiguity issues. For example, the statement "the patient has a history of chest pains" will be identified and structured as an historical medical condition rather than a current one. The software also contains lexicons that allow it to recognize and link the varying terminology used by medical professionals to denote the same medical fact or concept.

The acquisition of CBM was made to further Dictaphone HSG's strategy to develop a family of workflow solutions based on its "Voice-to-Text-to-Data-to-Knowledge" intelligent processing model. Dictaphone HSG's goal is to offer application solutions that allow physicians to easily use voice to inexpensively create patient records combined with the ability to subsequently identify and extract structured discrete data that can be used in medical knowledge applications.

Rob Schwager, President of Dictaphone HSG, said: "In addition to CBM's NLP technology, Dictaphone HSG's proven expertise in speech and language technology and our extensive industry experience position us well to develop new solutions for the healthcare industry. Our NLP-based solutions will enable healthcare providers to make better use of the rich clinical and administrative data contained within the millions of reports generated each year by our dictation and transcription systems."

About Dictaphone Healthcare Solutions Group

Dictaphone Healthcare Solutions Group (HSG) combines Dictaphone's healthcare technologies with the speech recognition and text processing technologies of L&H and Dragon Systems. The group has a strong base of dictation, transcription, and report management systems solutions currently being deployed in some of the nation's premier healthcare organizations. Its full range of solutions automates and integrates several critical reporting and processing elements in the creation and management of health information, helping healthcare organizations and clinicians improve productivity and the quality of patient care. In addition to the flagship Enterprise Express(R) platform, L&H PowerScribe(R) for Radiology is an integrated dictation and transcription system designed for radiologists in hospitals and group practices looking to reduce the costs and turnaround time associated with their dictated patient reports. Dictaphone HSG has also introduced the ichart(TM) family of Internet-based solutions that integrate existing products and technologies with new coding, natural language and data mining technologies, significantly reducing the costs of managing patient information. Dictaphone HSG digital dictation solutions are an integral part of the creation and flow of patient information in over half of all U.S. hospitals, currently supporting several hundred-thousand physicians who use the group's systems to generate an estimated one million reports and 100,000 hours of dictation a day.

About Lernout & Hauspie

Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. ("L&H" or the "Company") is a global leader in advanced speech and language solutions for vertical markets, computers, automobiles, telecommunications, embedded products, consumer goods and the Internet. The company is making the speech user interface (SUI) the keystone of simple, convenient interaction between humans and technology, and is using advanced translation technology to break down language barriers. The company provides a wide range of offerings, including: customized solutions for corporations; core speech technologies marketed to OEMs; end user and retail applications for continuous speech products in horizontal and vertical markets; and document creation, human and machine translation services, Internet translation offerings, and linguistic tools.

L&H's products and services originate in four basic areas: automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), digital speech and music compression (SMC) and text-to-text (translation). For more information, please visit Lernout & Hauspie on the World Wide Web at www.lhsl.com.